Restoring the Gulf: difficult and expensive

Copyright 2011: Houston Chronicle

Updated 6:54 pm, Tuesday, December 13, 2011

A week ago Monday, a federal-state task force laid out a sweeping new initiative to restore the environmental integrity of the Gulf Coast area after years of abuse and neglect. Its goals include improving marine habitat protections, better water quality, and rebuilding the shrinking Mississippi Delta wetlands, which comprise about 25 percent of the nation's wetlands.

The same day, the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi began a four-day summit meeting in Houston, reported the Chronicle's Matthew Tresaugue, which addressed, among other issues, how to implement the task force's goals. Attended by about 400 scientists, state and federal officials, conservationists and business leaders, this was the institute's first such meeting since last year's Deepwater Horizon disaster, when a drilling platform exploded, releasing almost 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf.

That tragedy not only cost 11 human lives, it fouled more than 1,000 miles of shoreline, harmed or killed thousands of birds, marine mammals and sea turtles, and vast numbers of fish and invertebrates. It also brought into sharp focus the history of neglect that had left the Gulf - one of our country's most fragile, and most productive, ecosystems - in dire straits.

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The Harte institute reports that the Gulf area provides about 40 percent of the annual U.S. commercial fish yield (more than 2.4 billion pounds), offers critical habitat for 75 percent of the waterfowl that migrate across the U.S., and yields 90 percent of our nation's offshore oil and gas. It also is home to two of the busiest ports in the world, Houston and New Orleans.

Federal officials estimated that restoring the Gulf would cost billions of dollars and take many years to accomplish. But the effects of not addressing the Gulf's problems would also incur a heavy cost: "Not only is the Gulf Coast a national ecological treasure, but it is a national economic engine," wrote Mark Davis, director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy in New Orleans, to the task force.

So how to go about funding such a mammoth project? The task force has endorsed using a "significant portion" of the Deepwater Horizon disaster fines, estimated at between $5 billion and $20 billion, and bipartisan bills have been filed to allocate up to 80 percent of the total to the plan. That would be an excellent use of those funds, but under current law, those monies go to the general treasury, and must be replaced. That does not bode well for freeing them up in the current fiscal climate.

Another possible source of funding was suggested by Laura Huffman, Texas director of the Nature Conservancy: It is for federal agencies and others to follow the example set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has committed $50 million to get the project started - a modest sum, but still a start.

We encourage Congress to support current efforts to legislate using fines for the plan, and urge all other avenues of funding from agencies and other sources: Foremost among these should be energy companies, currently reaping record profits, and other businesses that exploit the Gulf's resources. It is to their particular advantage that this vast cornucopia of commerce and ecological treasures be restored.